Bone Marrow Donors Apparently Have Been Found for Oxnard Boys

Researchers have apparently tracked down bone marrow donors for two Oxnard children whose fight against a rare immune system disorder galvanized the Los Angeles Police Department and thousands in Los Angeles and Ventura counties.

The two young boys became the impromptu poster children for the crusade to register more people on the National Bone Marrow Donor Registry after their grandfather, Lt. Ron LaRue of the LAPD’s North Hollywood Division, appealed to his colleagues to find a donor match for his ailing grandsons.

The LaRue family sought to examine as many potential donors as possible, in hope of locating the required exact match in body chemistry between donor and recipient.

“[Doctors] told us it’s like winning the lottery for someone to get a match,” said Theresa LaRue, the boys’ mother as she discussed the long odds her children faced.

“We thought, can we win it twice?”

Theresa and Scott LaRue have already lost a child, 1-year-old Layne, to the rare immune disorder, known as X-linked lymphoproliferative disease. He died last summer.

Despite the thousands of volunteers who answered the call, it was previously existing avenues for bone marrow donors that provided the matches.

News that a possible bone marrow match had been found in Finland for 3-year-old Garrett LaRue came Saturday, only days after 8-month-old Blayke LaRue had begun chemotherapy at UCLA Medical Center to prepare for treatment that could save his life.

Blayke LaRue on Thursday will undergo a relatively new procedure in which umbilical cord blood from the donor will be infused through a three-millimeter-wide catheter inserted through his chest into a major blood vessel near his heart.

The infusion is tantamount to a bone marrow transplant because blood from the umbilical cord contains the same type of stem cells--the critical element gleaned from the marrow--that are found in a regular donation of bone marrow.

The procedure has been done only about 120 times before, said Dr. Pablo Rubinstein, the director of the placental blood program at the New York Blood Center, the blood bank that provided the match for Blayke.

The process came into use only three years ago, when the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute of the National Institutes of Health provided funding for the ground-breaking research.

“We are extremely happy each time this happens,” Rubinstein said of his staff’s joy at learning they had struck a match in Blayke LaRue’s case. “At every step . . . people [act] as if the life of someone depends on everything they do.”

The plight of the LaRue children, as well as that of Michelle Carew, the 18-year-old daughter of California Angels Coach Rod Carew, contributed to an outpouring of donations, with 7,600 people coming forward to register during the past two months, about double the average number, said Bunnie Foxcroft, the director of the bone marrow program for the American Red Cross in Los Angeles.

Support for the LaRues continues still. On Feb. 17, at Santa Clarita City Hall, another drive is to be held.

“It gives us tremendous comfort,” Lt. Ron LaRue said of the drives. “We were concerned about getting a match for our grandchildren, but at the same time, by getting people to turn out, I know we’ve saved someone’s life.”

Doctors meanwhile are still performing tests on the potential donor in Finland to ensure the donor’s compatibility to Garrett.

Though doctors hope to perform the procedure as soon as possible, the physicians and the family decided it might be too stressful to have both children receive treatment at the same time.

Theresa LaRue and her husband, Scott, at the moment are keeping a constant vigil with their sick baby, trading shifts to make certain he is never alone. Although he is doing well so far despite nausea, Theresa La Rue says that Blayke has a tough time during the afternoons.

“He’s very strong and doing well for what his little body is being put through,” she said.

His treatment on Thursday should take less than 30 minutes. After that, doctors will watch for allergic reactions and side effects. It will take six weeks before they are confident that the procedure has been a success.

“We have a lot of faith that it will be a very good outcome,” Theresa LaRue said. “We’ve had so many blessings in such a short amount of time.”